Rants & Raves

Rants & Raves – Rants & Raves

Desensitization … or Catharsis?
Congratulations to Wired on "Game Ratings," the article on the Senate videogame rating scheme (Wired 2.11, page 120). The picture on page 123, depicting Bambi being approached by a masked, male figure as she sits, chained to the bed, should have been rated Level 4, and could be considered "obscene" under some state laws.

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I submit that a female deer Moreau (to borrow S. Andrew Swann's terminology), naked, chained, and about to be subject to the attentions of the masked figure, would be closer to Level 4 than the relatively innocuous Level 2 it was designed to illustrate. I would most definitely feel that way if the scene appeared in a videogame that I was considering for my 7-year-old son (or even my 19-year-old daughter). I agree that the right to free speech should cover the designers, manufacturers, and resellers of the games, but let's at least give the parents a chance to help their kids make reasonable choices. If we do nothing, we run the risk of the Ultra Liberal Know-It-Alls and the Ultra Conservative Bluenoses banding together to shove something even worse down our collective throats!

While Rogier van Bakel believes he has found the core objection to a videogame rating system – namely that it is logically indistinguishable from a rating system imposed on books – there are at least four reasons why we should not see recent congressional overtures as an apocalyptic assault on our liberty. I mention these arguments despite the fact that I, like van Bakel, oppose such a rating system.

There's a big difference between freedom of speech and freedom of expression. The latter – such as wearing a shirt that reads "Fuck you" – has never been given the same level of protection by the Supreme Court as the former. I think you could make a strong case that the content of videogames falls into the latter category.

Videogames ain't books. We can argue about whether videogames have editorial content worthy of protection under the First Amendment, but you can't possibly consider videogames to be as central to our notion of free speech as books.

Which leads to my third point: slippery-slope arguments are inherently suspect. Just as I dismiss the NRA's argument that a seven-day waiting period for buying handguns will inexorably lead to a prohibition on owning any firearm, so am I suspicious of van Bakel's argument that ratings on videogames will inexorably lead to ratings on books.

And finally, other media have survived rating systems quite nicely. I think you'd be hard-pressed to argue that movies have less independence and less political speech than they did before the rating system was imposed. Likewise for comic books.

If van Bakel and the readers of Wired are serious about stopping a videogame rating system, they will just have to contend with some serious arguments, not the simplistic claim that ratings are the vanguard of utter tyranny.

Hey, I like a good blood-'n'-guts shoot-'em-up videogame as much as the next guy, but I have to add an important point that was not raised by Rogier van Bakel in his piece on the proposed videogame rating system: kids. Van Bakel's casual assertion that "the violence graph has actually been pretty flat for years" is simply not true.

Over the last 10 years, the number of violent crimes committed by children has skyrocketed. While the desensitization-versus-catharsis argument over the effect of violent visual media will likely rage on, it's pure common sense that certain images are inappropriate for children. Children do not always have the social sophistication of adults in discerning fantasy from reality.

All too often, this is proven in our criminal court system. And, no, you don't always get the complete content information for a game or interactive movie from its wrapper.

My opinion will doubtlessly not sit well with the woolly-hatted rave-going contingent of your readership. Having been a similar counterculture type some 10 years ago, I understand the feeling. But I simply cannot see the point of bashing any attempt to warn parents that the game they're considering for junior's birthday may contain a rape scene.

Chris Maddi
Chicago, Illinois

While I do mind having government in the faces of the people – especially when it comes to censorship – it scares the hell out of me to think that the production of Level 4 games is necessary to keep the masses happy.

People have become numb to the input they receive. It's amazing there aren't more mental cases running around, reliving their favorite scenes from these games.

Rock the eVote – Privately, Please
As one who has chaired panel discussions on electronic voting at the Computers, Freedom & Privacy and National Computer Security conferences, I would like to briefly comment on your eVote article by David Voss ("Making Cyberspace Safe for Democracy," Wired 2.11, page 42). I have met Marilyn Davis, spoken with her about her product, and perused her documentation and other materials. I find her to be tremendously naïve regarding computer security issues.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology has an extensive set of procedures for creating and validating private and secure systems. I would urge Davis to consider certification of her product by the institute, and would also urge her not to promote it as either private or secure until and unless she has done so. She does a disservice to the entire computing community by misleading people otherwise.

The issues regarding electronic voting are numerous. For a better look at them, please refer to the 1993 NCSC proceedings (available free from the National Institute of Standards and Technology ) as well as my articles in the November 1992 and 1993 Communications of the ACM on electronic voting.

Rebecca Mercuri
Research Fellow, University of Pennsylvania

If Rebecca Mercuri has a specific technical beef about eVote, she should make it, and make it quick. EVote is proceeding. We don't need to show you no stinkin' badge.

Nevertheless, privacy, security, and user confidence are paramount to the eVote mission. While secure electronic vote counting was once considered impossible, with encryption the rules change. Encryption means we can now keep our ballots online and still keep them private. Because the ballots are kept, tallies can be redundantly and independently calculated for double security. This opens the door for a new generation of democracy tools. The eVote system is just a seed.

While I have an aversion to bureaucracy (after all, bureaucracy and politicians are exactly what eVote obsolesces), I would subject eVote to a fair and open bureaucratic verification process if Mercuri or someone else would foot the bill. – Marilyn Davis

Hack the HOPE
At first glance, Charles Platt's review of the Hackers On Planet Earth (HOPE) conference ("Hackers: Threat or Menace?," Wired 2.11, page 82) appears to be a parody of itself. Here is an article that makes fun of journalists attending the conference searching unsuccessfully for criminals, is written by a journalist doing just the same, and ends up with genuine disappointment at not finding any crime. It doesn't take long to realize that Platt takes his judgmental little discourse very seriously, however. Like so many before him who have attempted to cover the hacker world, he just doesn't get it.

Platt strongly implies that 2600 corrupts people by providing a forum for hackers, an accusation I find offensive and typical of those sensationalist reporters who will concoct any fact to sell a story. 2600 provides a vital service to people who are curious – it disseminates obscure information.

Of all those in attendance, the vast majority were captivated by something or someone at some time during the conference. The rather simple moral here is that if you spend all your time looking for things that don't exist, you'll wind up being very disappointed. It's too bad Wired readers were robbed of the chance to see the significance of the largest hacker event in history.

In Wired 2.11, you published another article idolizing so-called "hackers."

I was a teenager who couldn't get girls once, too, and I know very well that what hackers do has little to do with "freedom of information," and a lot to do with pissing people off for the sole purpose of feeling like a big shot.

The bottom line is that these self-seeking nerds will crack the Metrocard, costing taxpayers millions to have somebody figure out a hacker-proof security system. Some information is better left unliberated. To willfully and pointlessly expose other innocent people and organizations to loss and harm is irresponsible to say the least.

Wired's fawning attitude toward these hard-up, petty data-vandals doesn't advance our society one bit. Let's see a hacker break into Wired and scramble your hard disks just before press deadline: we'll see how cool you think they are then.

Jeff White
Cedar Crest, New Mexico

This Bill Will Truly Cost You
Things are looking pretty bleak for the Net community when a good reporter like Brock Meeks produces the no-resemblance-to-reality report on the FBI wiretap bill that appeared in the October issue ("Spooks in the Machine," Wired 2.10, page 31).

The wiretap plan was dead in the water until the "Digital Privacy Working Group" (a Washington trade group) signaled its willingness to cut a deal with the FBI. The bill obviously covers the Internet (it even discusses access to subscriber records), expands wiretap authority (Section 103), and extends warrant authorization (Section 208). Subpoenas – not warrants – continue to provide the government with access to online records (Section 207). The line about how the bill "doesn't let the bureau get its hands on the coveted Internet or any other online system" must have been an extended typographical error.

The bill encompasses mandatory wiretap standards for every telecommunications carrier in the United States (Section 103); the wiretapping "wish list" of the Attorneys General (capacity requirements for wiretapping, Section 104); new wiretap obligations for industry groups, standard-setting organizations, professional associations, and state utility commissioners (Section 107); and US$10,000 per day fines for telecommunication companies, manufacturers, and providers of telecom support services that aren't wiretap ready (Section 201).

As for the democratic process, the bill literally passed in the middle of the night. There were no recorded votes. Many Senate staff members had been told the legislation would be put off until next year, when there would be a chance for real debate. Who lobbied for the bill? The FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and Naval Intelligence.

This FBI wiretap bill puts the Attorney General smack in the middle of new network technologies. If you liked Clipper, you'll love Digital Telephony. And don't forget the $500 million in taxpayer dollars that will go to the companies that fund the Washington lobby groups that pulled off this masterpiece (Section 110). Just for the record, EPIC, the ACLU, Voters Telecomm Watch, and the US Privacy Council opposed the bill.

Best of all, we now have the pleasure of paying for all of this nonsense.

Wired bought the same line as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. I will bet money that none of the reporters read the bill.

I say it's a sad day when EPIC – the best "roll-up-your-sleeves, let's fight this `til we drop" privacy group around – comes off sounding like a sore loser.

Yes, I have read the bill. It doesn't allow the FBI wiretap access to electronic data communications as the FBI pushed for in the first couple of drafts. Yes, they can get access to Internet "records," meaning certain transactional data and e-mail, but they've always been able to do that.

This bill doesn't provide any extraordinary access to those records, and, in fact, a bit more protection has been added to the bill regarding the "transactional" records.

These records include: who sends mail to you, whom you're receiving mail from, as well as the subject lines of those messages; what Usenet newsgroups you subscribe to; what pay-per-view movies you've ordered. Before this bill passed, the FBI could get all that information with a single subpoena ("Give it to us. Now"). Now, they must get a court order to get that same information. The court order requires law enforcement agencies to show a cause of "specific and articulable facts" that any such record has direct bearing on a criminal investigation. This keeps the FBI from going on a "fishing expedition" through your online transactions.

Now this isn't the level of protection that EPIC wanted, but it's better than nothing. At least the FBI will now have to jump through a few extra hoops to get the records. It won't stop them – hell, it probably won't even slow them down. Nonetheless, those extra steps are still there.

Another important point is that the FBI et al. won't be able to frontload electronic communications networks with wiretap capabilities, as they once would have liked.

As to your remarks about how the bill "encompasses mandatory wiretap standards," there is no debate there; I never refuted that. In fact, I derided this aspect of the bill in my widely distributed CyberWire Dispatch as "the nationalization of the US telephone network."

Nobody likes this bill. Not you, not me, not the telephone companies that must comply with it. I called it "chemo from Congress." You know what effect chemotherapy has on a person, don't you? It makes you deathly sick; it damn near kills you while offering the hope of saving you. This bill operates in much the same way.

Would it have passed in the 104th Congress as a more onerous bill? You're damn right it would have. Just take a look at the GOP leadership and you'll see it would have been a slam-dunk for the FBI. In fact, they're probably sick now that they "collaborated" with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as FBI Director Louis Freeh characterized his working relationship with that group. If Freeh hadn't had such a hard-on for the bill, he could have gotten his first or second draft passed. Not a pleasant thought, I know.

For the record, EPIC does one hell of job all the way around, bar none. I've told you that before this bullshit letter was printed and I'm saying it again, in print. You guys do great work.

Meeks out…

We're Teen, We're Queer, We Have Friends
Kudos to Steve Silberman for "We're Teen, We're Queer, and We've Got E-mail" (Wired 2.11, page 76). And an equal round of applause to Wired for having the courage to address such an important matter.

When I was coming out (nearly 30 years ago), I wasn't simply hoping to get laid. I was looking for friends with shared interests, people I could relate to on an intellectual and compassionate plane, and, more than anything else, guidance. Had the gay schoolteachers who I now know were on the faculty not been so terrified of being "exposed," they might have been able to help hundreds of students avoid long hours of gut-wrenching angst simply because they had no adults in their lives with whom they could safely share their thoughts.

While some people rage at NAMBLA, others assume that all gay teens want to do is have sex. A much more important issue is at stake. Teenagers, gay or straight, have difficulty communicating their thoughts and being taken seriously by adults. Online services allow gay teens to communicate with others. Support systems can be built.

If more gay teens had access to gay cyberspace, we might have fewer teen suicides – and many more well-adjusted gay adults.

Thank you for your ongoing commitment to covering gay issues as they relate to the Net and burgeoning technology. Your article in 2.11 was terrific.

Unfortunately, gay teenagers account for roughly one-third of the teenage suicides in this country. The lack of role models as well as sources of reference material can create an awesome feeling of isolation. How wonderful that something like the Net is able to link these teenagers struggling to come to terms with, and understand, their sexuality. I only wish that something like this had been around when I was coming out.

Vive la Révolution
Wow! As a jaded Ivy Leaguer who has spent a lot of time working with politicians and media mavens, I am not wowed by every new product that comes down the pipeline. That's why I just wanted to write and say how impressed I am with both Wired and your new service HotWired. In fact, Wired magazine is one of the main reasons I'm going to graduate school next year – not to study dead philosophers and irrelevant postmodernists as I once planned, but instead to study the intellectuals who really matter today, those who are planning the next phase of the information revolution. Thanks for your help in opening the door.

Time to Walk the Walk
I am becoming increasingly impatient with the decidedly boogie-white-male, "liberal" slant with which Wired approaches certain issues concerning communications technologies.

Wired seems knee-deep in a kind of "white male"-ness that is more of a consciousness than a statistical state of being determined by skin color or genitalia. In other words, I am not as concerned with the number of "actual" white males who occur in the mag, either as writers or subjects, as I am with the specific nature of the content.

In "Conspiracy of Heretics," Joel Garreau discusses the Global Business Network at length, alternately referring to it as a "men's club," "brotherhood," and "fraternity" without once offering a critique of the very limited membership in this powerful /lite. When, a few pages down the road, he finally does make a nod to the issue, we encounter the tired and pathetic excuse that there aren't any "professional scenarist[s] with lots of experience who [are] women," but it's getting more "diverse" every day – just wait a few years.

The major problem arises out of the fact that Wired masquerades as a "liberal" publication and therefore professes to speak, in a certain sense, for "everyone," when in fact it does not.

You can talk the talk, but I think Wired could really benefit from walking the walk a bit more. You seem afraid to confront some of the less- (or un-) explored implications of new technologies, new power bases, new epistemologies, new heresies that exist beyond the easily identified movers and shakers in these new halls of privilege.

Dawn of the Living Data
Regarding Phil Agre's article "Living Data" in Idées Fortes (Wired 2.11, page 94), I was intrigued by the premise, but feel that Agre stopped short of the real leap we need to make in our conceptualization of data and how "alive" it is.

Instead of trying to animate the dead (in effect creating a myriad of Frankenstein's monsters by weaving together reanimated fragments of reality called "data"), I propose that we should instead be reconsidering the foundations of how and why we use computers, and in what ways they can most productively supplement our own capabilities.

For instance, we should concentrate our efforts on growing or breeding neural networks or similar logic systems which can accurately model complex processes such as the behavior of a group of consumers. In engineering, we should enhance our techniques of VR simulation and parametric design to more quickly and accurately model real objects (or systems of objects) – changing their properties by specifying what we want the object to do, not how we wish it done. Computers are capable of performing all the processes that engineers follow in their heads when designing an object, except for the initial step of desiring a better object.

These types of capabilities would increase our productivity tremendously, and cannot, I believe, be attained by simply making individual bits of data more complex or active. If we can successfully draw the virtual and actual worlds closer together, then we can eliminate the need for "data," living or otherwise, in a myriad of analysis-intensive tasks.

Even for purely tabulatory applications (inventory, personnel records, bookkeeping), perhaps we should concentrate on producing holistically accurate virtual mirrors of the individual things we want to keep track of. With such objects, anyone could then extract whatever individual parameters needed from the whole and consistent entity when necessary. The issues of ownership and security would be even more vital regarding such objects in such cases, but would also tend to relate more directly to established concepts of property rights. For example, the virtual mirror of me as an individual, including my health statistics, spending habits, political leanings, should be owned and controlled by me since in a real sense (virtually real?) it is me. I propose that our ultimate goal should not be to liberate our data, but to liberate ourselves from our data.

In Idées Fortes, you argue that data should be brought to life. In fact, knowledge bases in artificial-intelligence experiments, expert and decision-support systems, and even to some extent relational databases, have long depended on "live" data: many epistemological databases include secondary data on the nature of reliability.

Data is not likely to come to life across cyberspace, because there is no standard for live data. The closest we may get to widespread use is through some form of dynamic hypertext system that transparently stores links as textual information transmitted from person to person.

Clean and Sobered-Up
The experts' estimates for a "sober-up drug" that reverses the effects of alcohol are off by many decades ("Reality Check," Wired 2.10, page 46). Such a drug was invented by Roche some 10 or more years ago.

The company's decision not to market the drug for "ethical reasons" made all the major news, domestic and foreign. You should have no trouble finding a reference in the New York Times index.

No physical or even legal demarcation establishes just where the atmosphere ends and space begins. In fact, the atmosphere begins to thin from sea level, becomes unbreathable at an elevation of between 3 and 6 kilometers, becomes a fairly decent industrial vacuum at 100 kilometers, and persists to several hundred kilometers as traces of atomic oxygen then hydrogen. The International Astronautical Federation sets 100 kilometers as the minimum altitude for records (thus, most X-15 flights were considered to be inside the atmosphere), although no orbit below 160 kilometers is considered stable (the Space Shuttle usually orbits at 223 to 300 kilometers).

Because the technologies of atmospheric and orbital vehicles continue to change, no nation has wanted to set a legal boundary akin to the 3-mile limit for the high seas (set by the range of early shore artillery; antisatellite missiles can reach in excess of 200 kilometers).

Dave Dooling
Huntsville, Alabama

Chicago Isn't Such a Cool Place After All
In your November 1994 issue, you mention two interesting things: people are hungry for new views and outside-the-box thinking; Windows 95 will include built-in Internet capability.

Microsoft is old news. You're right – they'll probably rope people into their own online service.

But meanwhile, back at the ranch, IBM has built a global Internet access service (Internet in Croatia, anyone?) and has added the front end of that service to every copy of OS/2 that's shipping.

The Internet service is open: anyone who talks SLIP (OS/2 or no) is invited. The graphical front end is open: you can use the OS/2 tools to dial up and navigate any Internet service, not just IBM's. The TCP/IP stack is open: you can run anyone's OS/2 or Windows Winsock apps on top of the stack and the service.

Get out of the Microsoft box! I'd love to see a fair evaluation of IBM's new service in the pages of Wired. Your only discussion of it was months ago, when you incorrectly surmised that IBM was trying to rebuild the Internet.

(I'm an IBM employee, but this letter is personal, and does not represent blah blah blah.)

"Readers of this space know that Bill & Co. have plans for an online service in the near future, and that Windows 95 (formerly Chicago) will include built-in Internet capability if and when it ever ships." (Wired 2.11, page 38.)

But, because of a strange black hole in the media, they probably don't know that OS/2 Warp provides the same Internet features that Chicago promises, except that OS/2 Warp is available now, not some time in the distant future.

Frankly, your coverage of OS/2 has been abysmal. This is typical of the popular press, but inasmuch as you claim to be covering the leading edge, I would have thought that a cheap, comprehensive Internet package that runs on 386DX or higher, with 4 Mbytes of RAM or more, is more useable and more reliable than Windows, and is DOS- and Windows 3.1-compatible, might be worth a mention somewhere in your column.

Of course, I'm an IBM employee, so I don't depend on Wired for coverage of IBM or OS/2. Thank god.

(Disclaimer: speaking on my own behalf, not IBM's.)

Name and e-mail address withheld on request

The Taste of Success
Perusing Wired is like walking into a really good restaurant and smelling 1,100 different dishes at once, each one of them promising a different, wholly satisfying gustatory experience. I enter each issue with the same reaction; then I look around and realize – how the fuck am I going to read everything?

Tom Marble
Los Angeles, California

Undo
€ Regarding the Bryn Mawr Classical Review mentioned in "Goodbye, Gutenberg" (Wired, 2.10, page 68), the current URL is gopher://gopher.lib.virginia.edu/11/alpha/bmcr. € We mistakenly referred to Super Metroid as a 24-Mbyte game ("Femme Fatale Fantastico," Wired 2.11, page 133). Actually, manufacturers like big numbers, and, as such, measure game size in bits. Super Metroid is a 24-Mbit game. € Under the headline "Bringing Up RoboBaby" (Wired 2.12, page 74), we incorrectly attached Rodney Brooks to the Media Lab. He is with MIT's AI-Lab. € We included an extra slash in the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space's URL, in "Tired: NASA, Wired: Amateurs" (Wired 2.11, page 68). The correct address is http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/seds/seds.html. € Did you miss the list of sources for the December, 1994 Raw Data figures (page 62)? Here they are: Veronis, Suhler & Associates; Wilkofsky Gruen Associates; Jupiter Communications, Electronic Industries Association, InfoTech, Software Publishers Association; Ernst & Young; and the Semiconductor Industry Association. € The correct e-mail address of Steven Levy, author of "E-Money (That's What I Want)" (Wired 2.12, page 174) is steven@echonyc.com. Also in that same article, the words attributed to Donald Gleason beginning with the phrase "It costs money…" were actually those of the author.